Tag: hermit

I live in Burlington, Ontario, a nice lakeside city near Toronto. This story happened to me during a school trip when I was in eighth grade. At my elementary school, which by the way was Catholic, everyone in grade eight would get to go on two trips as part of their final year at the school. One trip took place in the fall and was usually a religious camping trip that took place about forty minutes out of the city. By religious, I mean everyone had to participate in group activities that revolved around being a good Christian and teamwork, etc. This, of course, completely sucked as this “camp” was little more than a religion class stretched to three days.

The second school trip always took place in the spring and was usually a trip to Ottawa for the weekend where we could explore the city and visit museums. For some reason, it was decided my year would instead take another camping trip (at a camp I will not name) about four hours away at Algonquin Provincial Park. The camp was on one of the many lakes in the park and was set up like your pretty typical summer camp. Cabins were spread out near the lake and partially in the forest and there were bathrooms and a mess hall in separate buildings. As you would guess, boys and girls shared separate cabins. The girls’ cabins were built on supports above the ground and were the ones closer to the lake. Our cabins were almost in the forest and built on the ground along a gravel road. I shared a larger cabin with about four other guys. Although our cabin was the largest, it was probably the least comforting. While the other cabins had actual windows and doors that would fully close and lock, our cabin looked like it was built from balsa wood, only had thin bug-screens for windows and a door that wouldn’t close. I should also point out that I had no experience with actual camping, as my family hates it, so this was a pretty bad first impression.

This is where the “creepy” story actually starts. On the first evening, we were all gathered outside the mess hall for a fun night activity. The camp counsellors told us about a hermit that lived in the nearby woods. The activity was that they were going to take us into the dark woods in groups to see where this hermit lived. This kind of caught us by surprise as it was quite random, but intriguing at the same time. As you would expect, everyone was pretty much screaming as we were led deeper into the woods with only our flashlights, looking for this hermit’s house. When we finally came across this “house”, which was little more than a huge log with a makeshift bed, we were led back to camp.